For fans of the avant-garde.
Twelve stories take up a variety of absurdist premises to investigate the meaning of life.
“Nobody thought the apocalypse would be so polite and quirky,” according to the final story in this collection, which imagines the end as a series of disappearances—first the house keys, then the cat, then one’s boyfriend, a lake, one’s memories. This sort of whimsical philosophical inquiry is a common thread in Kleeman’s (You Too Can Have a Body Like Mine, 2015) second book. With a literary genealogy that includes great-uncles like DeLillo and Pynchon and cousins like Rivka Galchen and Ben Marcus and can be traced back to/blamed on Samuel Beckett, many of the stories take up matters like “what if lobsters sought revenge?” “what if you forgot who you were?” and “what if the fake blood at a costume party were real?” using a narrator who sometimes seems like a normal person and sometimes like a disembodied poetic intelligence. In the latter form, we get passages like “The snow is what sand would be if it could forget its material, if it could forget its hardness, roughness, if it could forget its own weight. And the snow is what we would be if we could forget ours. If we could become the things we pretend instead of merely pretending at them, playing over and over at a game of falling silent and soft from couch to floor, making ourselves silent and soft as we can, playing at being snow, playing until our elbows and sides are too sore to move.” If that—from a 43-page story called “A Brief History of Weather”—goes over your head, there's a group of realist stories embedded in the middle of the collection with a central character named Karen. One of these, “Choking Victim,” recently appeared in the New Yorker. Its take on early motherhood combines more conventional character development and plot tension with the “intimations of mortality” that provide a focus for this rather inconsistent collection.
For fans of the avant-garde.Pub Date: Sept. 13, 2016
ISBN: 9780062388704
Page Count: 240
Publisher: HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: June 29, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2016
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
Tinny perhaps, but still a minutely rendered and impressively steady feminist vision of apocalypse.
The time is the not-so-distant future, when the US's spiraling social freedoms have finally called down a reaction, an Iranian-style repressive "monotheocracy" calling itself the Republic of Gilead—a Bible-thumping, racist, capital-punishing, and misogynistic rule that would do away with pleasure altogether were it not for one thing: that the Gileadan women, pure and true (as opposed to all the nonbelieving women, those who've ever been adulterous or married more than once), are found rarely fertile.
Thus are drafted a whole class of "handmaids," whose function is to bear the children of the elite, to be fecund or else (else being certain death, sent out to be toxic-waste removers on outlying islands). The narrative frame for Atwood's dystopian vision is the hopeless private testimony of one of these surrogate mothers, Offred ("of" plus the name of her male protector). Lying cradled by the body of the barren wife, being meanwhile serviced by the husband, Offred's "ceremony" must be successful—if she does not want to join the ranks of the other disappeared (which include her mother, her husband—dead—and small daughter, all taken away during the years of revolt). One Of her only human conduits is a gradually developing affair with her master's chauffeur—something that's balanced more than offset, though, by the master's hypocritically un-Puritan use of her as a kind of B-girl at private parties held by the ruling men in a spirit of nostalgia and lust. This latter relationship, edging into real need (the master's), is very effectively done; it highlights the handmaid's (read Everywoman's) eternal exploitation, profane or sacred ("We are two-legged wombs, that's all: sacred vessels, ambulatory chalices"). Atwood, to her credit, creates a chillingly specific, imaginable night-mare. The book is short on characterization—this is Atwood, never a warm writer, at her steeliest—and long on cynicism—it's got none of the human credibility of a work such as Walker Percy's Love In The Ruins. But the scariness is visceral, a world that's like a dangerous and even fatal grid, an electrified fence.
Tinny perhaps, but still a minutely rendered and impressively steady feminist vision of apocalypse.Pub Date: Feb. 17, 1985
ISBN: 038549081X
Page Count: -
Publisher: Houghton Mifflin
Review Posted Online: Sept. 16, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 1985
SEEN & HEARD
BOOK TO SCREEN
A modern day fable, with modern implications in a deceiving simplicity, by the author of Dickens. Dali and Others (Reynal & Hitchcock, p. 138), whose critical brilliance is well adapted to this type of satire. This tells of the revolt on a farm, against humans, when the pigs take over the intellectual superiority, training the horses, cows, sheep, etc., into acknowledging their greatness. The first hints come with the reading out of a pig who instigated the building of a windmill, so that the electric power would be theirs, the idea taken over by Napoleon who becomes topman with no maybes about it. Napoleon trains the young puppies to be his guards, dickers with humans, gradually instigates a reign of terror, and breaks the final commandment against any animal walking on two legs. The old faithful followers find themselves no better off for food and work than they were when man ruled them, learn their final disgrace when they see Napoleon and Squealer carousing with their enemies... A basic statement of the evils of dictatorship in that it not only corrupts the leaders, but deadens the intelligence and awareness of those led so that tyranny is inevitable. Mr. Orwell's animals exist in their own right, with a narrative as individual as it is apt in political parody.
Pub Date: Aug. 26, 1946
ISBN: 0452277507
Page Count: 114
Publisher: Harcourt, Brace
Review Posted Online: Nov. 2, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 1946
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